


Scenes From a Potion Laboratory

by ncfan



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate backstory for Lena, Gen, Magica when Poe gets back from being a crow it is over for you, POV Child, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 05:15:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15789693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: She wanted to be called Lena now, and few people cared to listen when she told them that. (That would turn out to be the least of her worries.)





	Scenes From a Potion Laboratory

She wanted to be called Lena now. She’d been trying to figure out what she wanted to be called for _ages_ now, and it wasn’t easy considering people had so many different names for her. Her full name was Minima Magdalena de Spell, a real mouthful which everyone around her liked to shorten in different ways. Daddy called her Minima; Mom, on occasions when Lena saw her, called her Madeleine, which made little sense, though she claimed Lena would understand when she was older.

The thing was, Lena didn’t _like_ the nicknames most people gave her. Even before she’d figured out she wanted to be called Lena, she’d known she didn’t like being called Minima, or Magdalena, or Madeleine; the first and the third she put up with primarily because it was Daddy and Mom calling her that. She didn’t like being called Mina, or Magda. Mags and Maggie were right out; she didn’t like Alenka, which was what one of her distant aunts, the aunt of a kind she only saw on the rare occasions Daddy took her to see the family, called her. And anybody who called her _Minnie_ would learn what a mistake they’d made soon enough. (Daddy made her apologize to her cousin after she pushed him in the slimy, empty fishpond at her grandparents’ dark, dusty old house. She’d crossed her fingers behind her back as she did it.)

She liked being called Lena best, and hardly _anyone_ called her Lena. Daddy wasn’t so bad, she supposed, since Daddy was more likely to call her Sweetheart than he was anything else, and she didn’t see most of her family besides Daddy. Mom lived far away, Daddy couldn’t take enough time off of work to visit his family, and his family didn’t come over here to visit them for reasons no one had seen fit to tell Lena.

When Lena got home from school that afternoon, she could hear the harsh, uneven sounds of a conversation in progress in the lab before she even got all the way through the front door.

“—you won’t live up to your obligations; don’t you _want_ —“

“What I _want_ is to live in—“

“Ugh, Poe; you have no sense of loyalty.”

“I didn’t see _you_ complaining about my loyalty when I took you in. Where’s your gratitude now?”

“Trapped in the netherworld along with my body. And it’s hardly my fault Mother and Father have that ward around their house that vaporizes shadow familiars; I didn’t realize it would do the same to me until I felt my fingers start to shake loose. My point is—“

“—told you, Magica. I don’t have time. Not all of us can throw our lives away on—“

They weren’t shouting, which to Lena was as much an invitation to head into the lab as she was ever going to get—besides which, they’d had to move the fridge in there after an _accident_ in the kitchen, and they hadn’t been able to move it back yet. Lena was hungry, and that was where all the snacks were.

The conversation, whatever it was about, ground to an abrupt halt when Lena pushed the door to the lab open, to be replaced by “Hello, sweetheart” and “Hello, sweetie”, almost identical in distracted (but already losing the anger that had put Lena a little on edge when she’d first heard it) inflection. There was Daddy standing by one of his cauldrons (the ceramic one; Lena vaguely remembered him saying something about needing a ‘sterile environment’ this morning before she left for school, though she didn’t really understand what that meant), his apron splattered with something blue and shiny. And there was Aunt Magica, eyes narrowed as she looked into the cauldron’s depths.

As in, the shadow on the wall that didn’t have any clear source.

Yes, you heard that right. The talking shadow on the wall was her aunt. Lena didn’t even _pretend_ to know how that worked. Aunt Magica tried explaining it to her sometimes, but she usually just started yelling about someone named ‘Scrooge,’ which brought Daddy running and threatening to “change the wards on the foundations,” which made Aunt Magica shoot off to go sulk in the attic.

“How was school?” Daddy asked as Lena rooted through the fridge, trying to figure out if they had any pudding cups left. (They did not; Lena puffed out her cheeks in frustration, forced to content herself with an orange cup instead.) “Did the librarian fix the problem with your library card?”

“Yes, Daddy. I can check out books again!”

He smiled, the whatever he was having with Aunt Magica seemingly forgotten. “That’s good. Just remember not to take your library books out of your backpack when you’re in here. If you want to read, take your book…” He waved his hand vaguely, eyes abstracted. “…To your room. Or the parlor. Or outside. Or wherever, I suppose; just not in here.”

Lena nodded seriously, managing not to wince as she remembered the last time she’d tried to read a library book in here. The school librarian knew about Daddy being a potion brewer, but that didn’t make her any less alarmed by the glittering purple stains that made your skin itch and wouldn’t come out. Especially considering that itch settled into a rash for everyone who made contact with the book. The librarian had told her, looking like she didn’t know whether to be exasperated or impressed, that of all the books over the years that had come irreparably damaged into her hands, this was undoubtedly the only one she’d ever had to ask a group of men in hazmat suits to burn.

The spot sure had been pretty, though. It was a shame they made everybody’s skin itch.

“Quite the little bookworm you’ve got there, dear brother,” Aunt Magica muttered, but Daddy ignored her, and Lena didn’t really see why that was supposed to be a bad thing. Lena read to her when she got bored, after all, and she never complained _then_.

Lena went to the table by the fridge to do what little of her homework she hadn’t finished on the bus, Daddy went back to his potion-brewing, and Aunt Magica to her sort-of supervising of potion-brewing, and all was quiet for a little while. Daddy didn’t usually talk a lot while he was brewing his potions, unless he had to say incantations over the ingredients or he was asking Lena to pass him something. Aunt Magica… honestly seemed to be in a sulk again. And Lena knew she could get her homework done soon if she just had some time to herself.

It was just after Lena had finished her homework and had taken out her word search book and her highlighters (it had been a great day when she’d discovered she could make purple by overlaying blue and pink) that the silence was broken. A small noise emitted from her father’s throat as he patted the counter besides his cauldron and, it would seem, found it empty of something he needed. Lena watched as a frown stole over his face, his forehead scrunching up. “Minima, would you get me the jar of powdered dragon claw in the refrigerator?”

Lena frowned sharply. “Daddy, I _told_ you; I want to be called _Lena_.”

Aunt Magica chortled, the sound reverberating in the room like the grating of something metal against stone. “Yes, Poe, don’t you remember? She wants to be called _Lena_. I’m a shadow, and I remember that!”

Daddy fixed Aunt Magica in a long stare—not angry, not exactly, and not exactly irritated, either. It was still and silent and honestly, Lena couldn’t tell what Daddy was feeling at all. Then, he shook his head and sighed. “I’m sorry. _Lena_ , would you get me the jar of powdered dragon claw out of the refrigerator? I need it for the potion I’m brewing; if it’s not in there, it will destabilize once I’ve added all the other ingredients.”

Lena’s frown melted away in favor of a smile, her heart fairly bobbing in her throat as she went for the jar of powdered dragon claw. She knew it was a silly thing to be happy about—she was seven, but that didn’t make her _stupid_ —but she’d been fighting for so long to get someone besides Aunt Magica to call her Lena that she couldn’t help but grin so wide it made her jaw ache.

-0-0-0-

Most kids, when they got home, only had to do homework and chores. Maybe they played sports, but Lena’s school didn’t let students sign up for sports until they were in third grade, which was entirely too far off, as far as Lena was concerned. (She wanted to play soccer. Aunt Magica said she’d get bored with it in less than two months, three, tops, but Aunt Magica always seemed to think Lena got bored more easily than she actually did. Maybe it was because Aunt Magica was bored all the time, being a shadow on the wall who could only talk to people and look at things.)

The point was, most kids had their homework, their chores, and then that was it. Had nothing to do the rest of the day, so they spent it however they wanted—watching T.V., mostly, if what Lena’s classmates kept chattering about was supposed to be an indication of their afternoon activities. Lena? Had something different that she did.

Lena sometimes thought of it as going to school twice in one day, though the second was much more fun than the first, there being no homework or quizzes. Learning was much more fun when there was no pendulum of “bad grades/good grades” swinging over her head, though Lena had yet to convince her teacher at school of the wisdom of her position.

“Now, Lena, the trick is to add the mint powder doing this sort of spiral motion; it’s easier to really get the powder mixed in with the rest of the solution if it’s already scattered about like this.”

“What does the mint do, Daddy? Does it keep the potion from making anyone throw up when they take it?”

With a rueful laugh, “Alas, no; I could charge more if it did. The mint just improves the taste and the smell, is all. No real effect asides from that, and it’s something of a miracle that it doesn’t make the potion less effective.”

Potion-making was much more fun than Lena had expected anything a grown-up did for a job to be. Maybe it would have been more fun if Daddy had let her start learning about it sooner, or if he didn’t make her stop what she was doing every time he left the room (He said she had to be supervised, and that Aunt Magica didn’t count—which offended Lena and Aunt Magica both, for your information). It was fun because of the feeling of taking a ton of little things and making something new out of them—that rush Lena felt race through her to know she’d made something _new_. The other kids didn’t understand. They had homework and chores and dance lessons and softball practice. Lena had _creation_.

“Found a potion to get me my body back yet, Poe?”

Aunt Magica rarely announced herself by knocking on the door, or by whatever the equivalent would have been for a shadow. Aunt Magica just injecting her harsh, warbling voice (not warbling the way a little songbird warbled, but warbling the way the wind warbled at high speed and high pitch through hollowed-out gourds with holes in them, if those gourds were just the right shape and those holes in just the right spot. Her voice _sounded_ human, but that was just it—it only _sounded_ human. So Lena always jumped a little when her aunt spoke up unexpectedly. Lena jumped a little a lot.

Daddy, on the other hand, didn’t jump at all, though his forehead scrunched up. “Some things are beyond my power to give you, Magica—and I think you’ll find there are few potions equipped to deal with what happened to you.” He raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Or are you telling me you want me to _experiment_ on you with new potions?”

Personally, Lena thought experimenting sounded cool, and thus she was a little taken aback when Aunt Magica hastily replied, “No, no! That is _not_ what I want, Poe! Don’t put words in my mouth unless you’re prepared to deal with me putting them back in _yours_.”

In the past, when Daddy won the verbal sparring matches he was constantly having with his sister-who-is-a-shadow-on-the-wall, he’d smile. Sometimes he’d grin, and sometimes the smile would just be the suggestion of muscles moving around his mouth—the ghost of a smile that was quickly consigned back to peaceful rest in the afterlife. Today? He didn’t smile. He just made a humming noise in the back of his throat, and went back to supervising Lena’s potion-making.

And Aunt Magica didn’t bother him. She didn’t say something to get his attention, though there were a number of things she could have said that would have gotten his attention immediately (And probably make him go red in the face, and maybe make him send Lena out of the room so he and Aunt Magica could say those words they both pretended Lena didn’t already know).

Lena was fed some more instructions, and the unsettled feeling in her gut seeped out of her as the joy of creation seeped back in. Tip in two teaspoons of unicorn milk, three grams of diced aloe, half a cup crushed St. John’s wort, and a cup of water. Stir until an even consistency was achieved…

“And we have a muscle ache tonic!” Daddy declared. He tousled Lena’s hair, smiling down at her. “Good work, sweetheart; it’s got just the right color.” The right color being a nearly incandescent green that reminded Lena nothing so much as the color everybody seemed to use for radioactive waste in old movies. “That’s much better than the first time I tried to make it.”

“Huh!” Aunt Magica let out a hoarse, sardonic laugh that sounded like the wind battering on a stray piece of rusted metal more than it did like a laugh. “If that is the potion I think it is, I remember clearly _your_ first attempt at making it—not that I could ever _forget_ the mess you made of our laboratory. Mother wouldn’t let you back in there for weeks.”

“That’s more because that’s how long it took for the spikes to recede,” Daddy said mildly. “Mother was fine with me trying again, so long as I had supervision.”

“Spikes?” Lena queried, glancing cagily at the cauldron full of glowing green. Suddenly, its resemblance to the radioactive waste of B-movies was stronger than ever.

Daddy’s smile faded somewhat, though it didn’t leave his face entirely. “I seem to have gotten your education a little mixed up, Lena; my apologies. Sooner or later—sooner, preferably—I will have to sit you down and talk about lab accidents.”

The thing was, Lena was seven. A pretty smart seven-year-old (in her own estimation), but still, seven years old. So the first thing she did was not nod seriously. It was not to promise to listen to and absorb everything her father told her about proper safety procedures in the lab. The first thing Lena did was screw her face up and ask reluctantly, “There aren’t gonna be any _quizzes_ , are there?”

Aunt Magica snorted. She snorted in response to a lot of things Lena said, so that wasn’t too surprising.

Daddy shook his head. “There won’t be any _grades_ , Lena, not if that’s what you’re worried about. I think grading your understanding would be rather trivializing the matter; that’s not what I want. I just—“ he mopped his forehead with a slow, rubbing movement of his hand “—I just want you to understand how to keep yourself safe when you’re in here. If you’re not paying attention while you’re brewing a potion, _anything_ can happen to you.”

-0-0-0-

Lena wondered briefly if what happened two days later was Daddy’s way of demonstrating the full breadth of ‘anything.’

Briefly.

In the time immediately after, there wasn’t much room in her screaming, hysterical mind for a thought so reasoned, let alone so cynical.

“Why did he fly away?!” Lena all but screamed at her aunt, as heaving sobs shook through her ribcage with the force of an earthquake scoring roughly an eight on the Richter scale, so strong they felt as though they ought to have shattered ribs with their tremors. She gesticulated wildly at the open window, out of which her father had…. Had… “Why did he do that?! Why didn’t he stay in here?!”

“I don’t know!” Aunt Magica protested, sounding hardly any less panicked than Lena herself. “I’ve never been turned into a crow during a lab accident before! He might have just panicked! Or he doesn’t remember being anything but a crow and flew off to make a nest or something, I have no idea!”

 _“What?!_ When’s he gonna turn back?!”

“Again, I have no idea. The potion you were making wasn’t even a shapeshift-inducer. It shouldn’t have done that at all!”

Lena sucked in a deep, gasping breath that didn’t gift her with nearly as much air as it should have. “Change him back.”

“I can’t do that, Lena.”

“Change him back!”

Aunt Magica shot up across the wall, her shadow-form distending and distorting, not that it scared Lena much. “ _I can’t do that, Lena_. Trapped in this form, the only magic I have left to me is the manipulation of shadows, and not much of that, even.” A harsh hiss escaped the flat plane of her mouth. “If you want someone to blame, blame Scrooge McDuck; do _not_ point your finger at me.”

Lena stared at her suddenly, frowning as she tried to force her mind to work normally. Beyond the parts of her mind that were clouded with terror, there was something else, a scrap of memory of whispered conversations, about the rumors of her aunt’s terrible power. Before whatever happened to Aunt Magica to leave her a shadow had happened, she was a sorcerer of terrible power, and her removal from the scene had… Well, the only way Lena could understand it was the way the landscape of the playground would violently change if a bully who’d dominated the jungle gym was suddenly removed from the equation. Except it wasn’t a playground, and it wasn’t children, and the adults who were scrambling to call dibs did a bit more than push down or punch in the face the people who kept trying to go after the stuff they wanted.

“What if,” she said slowly, her voice still trembling considerably, “what if you had your body back?”

Aunt Magica waved a hand through the wall. “Oh, if I was whole again, I could turn Poe back to himself in a flash; shapeshift spells have always been easy for me, though I can scarcely think of a category that _isn’t_.” She narrowed her eyes. “Are you volunteering to help me?”

“Yes.”

Lena didn’t have much time to think she’d said it too quickly. Truth be told, the idea she’d said it too quickly was only a distant muttering in the back of her mind. Her father was gone, and her aunt was her only real means of getting him back. She had no real misgivings.

Aunt Magica regarded her in silence for what felt like entirely too long, her eyes narrowed to featureless red slits. “Very well,” and her voice dragged more than Lena thought she’d ever heard it. “If you want to help me, there’s something you need to do first. Open up the potion book to the fifth section, the one with smaller pages.”

Lena had never seen her father make a potion from the fifth section of the book, and as she opened up that section and looked at it for the first time, she thought she had an idea why. The ingredient lists were in a language Lena could understand. The descriptions and instructions? Were not.

“Keep turning.” It turned out that Aunt Magica could understand that other language just fine, though. “Keep turning, you’re almost at the right spot. There!”

The title at the top of the page, written out in fading ink, read ‘Revinciunt animas simul.’ “Yes,” Aunt Magica muttered, “this one should do nicely—and we have all the ingredients right here! Now, if you want this to work, you’ll have to follow my instructions exactly, but it will be a good start…”

Lena was going for ingredients, measuring them out, and poring over the cauldron (the silver one, this time, the cauldron her father used the least, though Lena had never known why) for a little over an hour. She didn’t really register the passage of time. She didn’t register much of anything, outside of the potion’s progress and her aunt’s instructions.

Finally, it was done. The potion was a thick, goopy red that reminded Lena of thick mud still damp from rain but drying fast; it had a smell like milk just starting to turn, a smell that caught in the back of her throat and refused to leave. Lena looked expectantly up at Aunt Magica, trying her best to ignore the unpleasantness of the potion’s look and odor. “What now?”

“Now,” Aunt Magica said, “you drink it.”

She shouldn’t have hesitated. She needed Daddy to come back, and unless the effects of the lab accident wore off on their own (and Lena had never heard of such a thing happening; the effects had always needed to be counteracted with magic before, so why would now be different?), only Aunt Magica could bring him back to himself and bring him _home_. But the potion was just so nasty-looking, so much that she did indeed hesitate. “You need me to drink it?”

“Yes. It will let you help me get my body back. It’s the only way.”

Lena drank the potion, and it tasted just as awful as its appearance had suggested it would. She gagged, her eyes watering, as it clung to the roof of her mouth, burned her throat going down, made her stomach roil. It was like drinking the foulest mud imaginable, and soon, there was another feeling that made her wobble at her knees—that foul mud was seeping into the rest of her, replacing her blood and softening her bones. She tried to scream, but her voice was gone.

As Lena fell to the ground and the world began to blur around her, she heard as if from far away, her aunt’s voice:

“Oh, dear, I forgot to tell you: this potion has some _side effects_. But don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll take care of _everything_. You just have to do what I tell you.”


End file.
